What Happened When Queer Victims of Bullying Sat Down with Former Bullies

By Meredith Talusan

October 27, 2017

"There's a pain that never goes away completely."

Today, more than two decades after I came out as gay, fifteen years after I came out as trans, I have another coming out to do. Today, I’m coming out as a bully.

As a kid, I used to relentlessly pick on my younger brother and call him ugly, because I was resentful that he got to be a normal brown kid who would grow up to be a normal straight man while we were growing up in the Philippines, while I was albino and the only white kid in a village full of brown people, who couldn’t keep myself from being feminine. My brother became my template for dealing with people who pushed against my insecurities later in life, including other trans women who activated my self-hatred.

I arrived to tell my coming out story as part of a group of eight: largely strangers, some acquaintances, from different parts of the LGBTQ+ world. We gathered in a large studio in downtown Manhattan, surrounded by tall buildings, cameras and lights all around. It was a space far from the mundane lives we lived as kids, as I found out when I started talking to the others. I knew a couple of folks online, like John Paul Brammer, because I’d read his essay about encountering his bully on Grindr, and Cory Wade, a model and musician who I’d followed as a contestant on America’s Next Top Model. Other folks I didn’t know as well, like Alexander Perez and Travii Bonilla, a trans man and a butch lesbian who are youth advocates, and Teagan Rabuano, who I first read as an early-transitioning trans woman, yet is in fact a nonbinary femme who is a GLAAD Campus Ambassador and is in their senior year at NYU.

But I was on the lookout for bullies, because I knew the eight of us were put together to discuss our individual histories with bullying. Throughout my life, I’d met many queers who had been bullied, but I’d never spoken to another queer person who openly admitted to bullying others. I was intensely curious about these people and who they were.

Photo by Lia Clay

My main candidate was Remy Duran, with the teardrop tattoo on the left corner of his eye and visible chest hair coming out of his tank top, groomed and arranged like a bouquet of flowers. His grin evoked both mischief and confidence in his desirability, staples of the bully character type. And if I were to guess, I could see the guy across from me at breakfast, Garrett Schlichte, with his pouty expression and flouff of curly blond hair perched atop his head like a crown, as someone who could easily make someone cry.

The eight of us sat in a circle as Lee Keylock and Bonnie Moses from Narrative 4, a global network dedicated to building empathy and sparking change through stories, gathered to talk to us about what we were going to do that day. They told us that we would be paired up to tell our stories about bullying to each other, and then we would come back together as a group to retell those stories. We knew it was likely that a bullied person would be paired with a bully, and when the pairs were announced, I saw Teagan’s eyes widen with shock upon being paired with me. I would be their bully.

Sitting face to face, it was hard to quiet the voices in my head as Teagan began to tell their story. It was the voice that critiqued the presentations of other trans women, even when Teagan themself made it plain that they were non-binary and not a woman. I couldn’t help but project my reality onto them; to judge how they should look and behave. It’s a habit I’d learned to control over the years but have never quite broken, though I know too well that conforming our presentations to fit a cisgender mold is in itself a form of oppression.

Even when Teagan told me about how they were bullied in school — how boys from the football team they once belonged to threw out their stuff when they opened their locker, how those bullies threw food at them at lunch when they decided to wear a Lady Gaga t-shirt, how they were constantly teased in the locker room — my mind still protected itself. It was hard for me to inhabit Teagan’s life as Teagan, while I latched on to missing details of their story: what their high school cafeteria looked like or the color of that Gaga shirt they wore, jotting down notes as I went along. I heard my voice asking them questions and knew that it was the same voice I use whenever I report a story as a journalist, a voice that wants to pin down facts rather than understand truths, a voice that refuses to get too close. But I couldn’t help myself, and even when I hugged them, I could tell that part of me was acting, playing the studied role of confidante instead of being someone who was truly there for Teagan.

It was only when I began to tell my own truths that the layers of ice around my mind began to thaw. I told the story of my brother, and also revealed that early on in my transition, I picked on trans women who didn’t pass as well as me to make myself feel better. But worse, my bullying behaviors were disguised as concern: I gave trans women tips to make themselves look better, but inwardly reveled in how they didn’t look as good as me. At a time when the trans women I befriended were at their most vulnerable, I withheld the reassurance they needed that they were worthy and wonderful just the way they were.

Teagan hugged me hard and for a long time after I told my story, generous despite my concern over how my words might have affected them. It was a hug from someone who has experienced some of what I’ve made others feel, from someone who is trans and nonbinary like me. It was a hug that felt like forgiveness, a hug that felt like I was hugging myself.

The eight of us gathered together again, and even though we’d been in pairs for a while, the knowledge that we’d all had the same experience bound us without us having to be in the same room together. We knew what was coming: we would tell our stories to each other, and in the process, get a glimpse of each other’s lives.

“My name is Teagan and I grew up in Toledo, Ohio,” I began, the first one in the group, eager to get my story out. I talked about how I showed signs of femininity in first grade, how other kids started to notice and make comments. I talked about how getting picked on was gradual but by the time sixth grade came along, kids were calling me Tanya, and a camp counselor forced me to dress as a nurse for a comedy skit while hundreds of other kids laughed. I talked about how I got food thrown on me for wearing a Lady Gaga t-shirt, and how no adult in school could make it stop. And somewhere in that telling, in that space between those words that came gushing out of my mouth like they were mine, because they were mine, I found myself not only knowing what it was like to be Teagan, not only feeling what it was like, but being them, being the kid that they were and the adult they had become.

I’ve been bullied too. Kids in high school called me an albino faggot freak. Other students in college stopped hanging out with me when they found out I was gay or wasn’t “really” white. Someone I was living with in a co-op repeatedly talked about my genitals and called me a man dressed as a woman at the dinner table when I came out as trans in grad school. I knew what it was like to be bullied but I refused to feel what it was like. I mustered all the power I had accumulated, all my confidence, all my wit, all my anger, to squash those bullies and keep them out of my mind because it was the only way I knew how to survive.

I now realize that because I didn’t allow myself to feel bullied, I protected myself in one way but made myself vulnerable in another. My denial made me unaware of times when I’ve bullied others, when I’ve made them feel terrible for being who they are because of my own insecurities about myself, because I saw myself in them. I realize that every time I said something hurtful to another trans person, what I was really doing was not just hurting that person, but also saying those words to myself and hurting the part of myself that was most vulnerable. I was not only inflicting pain but amplifying it, hurting other people and making myself feel terrible and guilty. Allowing myself to feel what Teagan felt, what I felt when they were bullied, when I was bullied, has given me a path towards breaking these destructive habits. The reason I hadn’t forgiven myself for the pain that I caused was because I didn’t know how to assure myself that I wouldn’t do it again; that I wouldn’t knowingly hurt other trans people in the future. Living another person’s life, even for a few moments, gave me a way to forgive myself.

It helped that other former bullies like me — Garrett and Remy as I suspected from the beginning — told similar stories. Instead of judging them, I found myself offering them support and forgiveness for their courage in telling their stories, for their admissions, for their determination not to replicate those behaviors in the future. In many ways it was more moving, more beneficial, to see myself and others hugging them and forgiving them, rather than seeing others hug me. At that moment, after spending a day trying to see the world through other people’s eyes, I was able to let go of my constant self-concern and see other people’s lives as equally important to mine. I cherish that feeling and have carried it with me since I sat in that giant studio with those seven other people, where after a day together nothing else mattered — not the lights or the cameras or the surroundings — except for our stories and each other, our bullies who are also ourselves.

Photo by Lia Clay

Meredith Talusan is Senior Editor for them. and an award-winning journalist and author. They have written features, essays, and opinion pieces for many publications, including The Guardian, The Atlantic, VICE, Matter, Backchannel, The Nation, Mic, BuzzFeed News, and The American Prospect. She received 2017 GLAAD Media and Deadline Awards, and has contributed to several books, including Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America.